'That doesn't matter!' CNN Republican buried for insisting election should end Trump cases
Other CNN panelists pounced on a Republican strategist who argued that Donald Trump's felony convictions should vanish after he won a second term as president.
Trump is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 26 for his convictions on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, and he remains liable for $464 million in penalties for business fraud in a lawsuit brought by New York attorney general Letitia James, but GOP strategist Brad Todd argued that the election should nullify those cases.
"I think Tish James and [judge] Juan Merchan and [district attorney] Alvin Bragg have to also think about the fact that they serve and they prosecute other people based on the trust they get from the public in their authority they've been invested with," Todd said. "I don't know how you can look at New York's election results and conclude – Donald Trump gets 38 percent in Queens. You know, guess what – these people run in Queens, too."
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Meghan Hays, a longtime communications aide to president Joe Biden, was dubious.
"He was found guilty by 12 people on a jury, and those are of your peers," Hays said. "I don't understand how you don't have consequences for that. That's not a prosecutor, that was a jury that found him guilty."
Todd pushed back, saying those prosecutors "chose to bring those charges in an election environment," but legal analyst Elliot Williams disputed that position.
"I don't understand, well because he did well in the electorate, therefore people aren't going to bless the prosecutions," Williams said. "We cannot be in a situation where we're grafting political polling onto whether prosecutions ought to move forward or not. Republicans get prosecuted in Republican jurisdictions all the time."
Todd insisted the prosecutors had politicized the cases by bringing charges against a former president who was running again.
"The choice was made to involved the electorate in these prosecutions by the prosecutors when they waited as long as they waited, when they pushed it as far as they pushed it," Todd said. "They asked for this to influence the election, well now the election will influence the prosecution."
Hays came back to her point, arguing that Trump was convicted by a jury of 12 peers, but Todd argued that 77 percent of Americans told pollsters they believed that was a political prosecution.
"That doesn't matter, because 12 people found him guilty," she said. "That's the problem."
"People might support Ted Bundy," Williams added. "People might support serial killers – that doesn't matter."
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